


All the Words in the World

by SingingInTheRaiin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Don't question it okay, Gen, M/M, Season 2ish, Statement Fic, except Jon isn't crazy paranoid, making plans for a first date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21789868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SingingInTheRaiin/pseuds/SingingInTheRaiin
Summary: “Statement of Lysander Burrows regarding a very big library. Statement-”“It’s not just a very big library,” the old man cut Jon off. “It’s absolutely massive. Probably the biggest library in the universe!”Jon blinked a couple of times. “Right… Statement of Lysander Burrows regarding what is possibly the biggest library in the universe."
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 6
Kudos: 89





	All the Words in the World

“Statement of Lysander Burrows regarding a very big library. Statement-”

“It’s not just a very big library,” the old man cut Jon off. “It’s absolutely massive. Probably the biggest library in the universe!”

Jon blinked a couple of times. “Right… Statement of Lysander Burrows regarding what is possibly the biggest library in the universe. Statement recorded direct from subject, 12 May-”

“Okay, so it started when-”

Jon scowled at being interrupted twice in a row, but decided that it would be easier to just add the full date in after the statement was over than to try and argue about it. He leaned back in his seat and waited to hear the man’s story. 

“So it started when this kid showed up at my door, hollering away and making a fool of himself, but more importantly, disturbing the rest of the neighborhood. Now I live in a respectable community, and we’ve got standards to uphold if we don’t want the HOA after us-”

Jon frowned. “The what?”

Lysander rolled his eyes like it was Jon’s fault that he wasn’t being clear. “Homeowner’s association? Do you not have them over here? They make sure that everyone in the neighborhood is following the rules and living up to the same standards and such? One time my neighbor got fined for not mowing his lawn recently enough, and the bastard deserved it for when he let his dog-”

Jon held up his hand, and decided he didn’t care to know more about this American tradition. “Right, yes, back to your story.”

Lysander nodded, and resumed the relevant parts of his statement. At least, Jon hoped that the man would stick to what was actually relevant.  
,,,

Anyways, I live in a nice place, so having a kid pounding on your front door and screaming like he’s on fire is likely to get a guy in quite a bit of trouble, you know? So I threw the door open to see what the hell he wanted, and for a moment I thought I was looking at a ghost.

See, I had this girlfriend in college, and we got along just great, and were going to get married and everything. Maybe I wouldn’t call it true love, especially not compared to what I’ve got now, but at the time it was pretty great. She ended up getting herself pregnant, and even though I knew she’d been screwing around with other guys, I decided out of the goodness of my heart that I’d treat the bastard like he was my own. 

When I didn’t see her around for a few days, I didn’t think anything of it, but then her parents called me and told me that she was dead, and that the bastard was dead too. I thought it was a right shame, and I was pretty messed up by it.

Anyways, this kid standing on my front porch looked exactly like my college sweetheart, except, you know, a guy. I asked him what the hell he wanted, and he told me that he was my son and that made it my responsibility to protect him from something that was apparently after him, and that I needed to let him in.

Now I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’ve heard plenty of stories about kids who show up looking to scam money out of strangers, but the kid hadn’t said anything about money, and he looked just like Julie. I couldn’t let him inside, though, because my wife and kids were home, and there’s no way in hell I was going to introduce a bastard that wasn’t even mine to them. 

So I took him out to my car and said we’d go for a bit of a drive around while he explained what exactly was after him, and how he found me. He told me that he was raised by his mother, Julie, but that his father had never been in the picture. Apparently her parents lied to me because they thought that I wasn’t good for her. 

He told me that his mother had died recently, and left him very few belongings besides what appeared to be a treasure map. He followed the map and ended up traveling the world on some kind of weird scavenger hunt. I hardly believed him, because where would he have gotten the money to travel around like that? I never asked, but his grandparents probably showered him in cash. I swear that kids these days never work as hard for the things they want as I had to when I was his age.

Anyways, he told me that the hunt ended with him finding this massive library. One that apparently hadn’t been touched in years because it was full of dust, and there were no people around. He told me that he thought it might be bigger than the entire planet, and of course I didn’t believe him. I assumed that he was just on drugs or something.

He told me that the library had billions of books, and that every single one, at least as far as he could tell, were biographies. He said that there seemed to be a complete biography for every single person who’d ever been born, which is of course ridiculous. 

He said that he found the book on his mother- and how on Earth could he have found anything he was looking for if the library was as big as he claimed, right? But he said that he got to a part where she told her parents that she was pregnant with my kid, and my full name was in there. 

Then he got curious, and decided to find his own book. He said that it was complete already, because when he flipped to the back page it showed him the date of his death, which was supposedly coming up soon. That’s when he started to get incomprehensible, talking about some kind of shadow monster that was after him. 

I didn’t believe any of it, but then three days later I saw an article in the paper about him. He’d died running out into the middle of a highway, and the article mentioned that he was from London. Wouldn’t have guessed it from looking at him. I thought that it was a tragedy, but that it was the end of that. 

Then my wife told me that I got a strange letter that didn’t have a stamp or a return address, and when I opened it, I found a map. And I may have thought the kid was some kind of junkie, but I had no reason to think he’d kill himself just to mess with me.

I got it easy, though. The map led me straight to the library, which was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I guess the hunt is more of a cumulative thing than a challenge meant for an individual, you know? And let me tell you, no matter how much I describe the library, you’re never going to be able to picture it without seeing it for yourself.

On the surface, where the boat goes, is just this tiny little island, not much bigger than this Institute. Once you go inside, the only way to go is down. And even though your mind keeps telling you that it’s not possible for this thing to exist, you start going down anyways. There’s stairs and an elevator, and I took the stairs a few floors down just to see. And each floor is about normal height, full of tall bookcases packed with books.

When I went into the elevator, it said that there was about four hundred thousand floors. I didn’t look at all of them, obviously, but all the ones I did check were just as packed full of books. So I got curious and started pulling books off of shelves and checking them. And just like the kid had said, they were all biographies. I’ve looked it up, you know. There’s been over one hundred billion people alive on this planet at some point or another. That’s a lot of books. 

Some of the things I learned in there would make historians weep with jealousy. Complete biographies of people going back thousands of years, from every single place that people have ever lived. The further down I went, the newer the books were. 

I decided to take the elevator down all the way to the bottom floor. Now I didn’t have any food or water on me or anything, but somehow I was just fine, even though according to my watch, the ride took over three days. On the bottom floor, I was able to just kind of find whatever book I was looking for. I don’t really know how to explain it.

Since the kid was still on my mind, I looked for Julie’s book, and saw that she lived a decent life after her parents made her leave me. Then I looked for her parents, and was viciously pleased to see that they were both going to die in unpleasant ways.

I looked up a few other people that I know, including my own wife and children. It was nice to see that both of my kids are going to live to be old and gray with gaggles of their own grandchildren. One of em’s even going to be a rich lawyer, if you can believe it. That’s about the time when my curiosity started to grow, and I just had to see my own book.

I knew where it was immediately, and made my way over to it in something of a trance. From what I could tell from the many books I looked at, they were organized by the age of the person they were about, some of them only tiny fractions of a second apart. 

I found mine and looked through the first few pages. There were pictures of me as a child, and when I got to my teenage years, it brought back so many memories that I think I might have cried. I read through every word of the book until I finally reached the last page. I took a deep breath before I turned it, and saw the final page in the same style as all the other books. A picture of what I would look like before the end, and the date of my death. It showed me looking the same as I do now, and gave me about three weeks. That’s about when I noticed something watching me, and turned around. 

You’re probably already thinking I’m crazy, so I can’t really make things any worse for myself. There was this creature, a giant shadow that looked like it was supposed to be a person, but forgot how. The thing that was the strangest is that it was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that looked identical to the one my wife had gotten me on vacation a couple years back. 

I wasn’t exactly going to stick around and ask questions, though, so I just ran for the elevator, and took the three day trip back up to the surface. I got on the boat I rented and rushed back to the mainland. I want to go home and spend the rest of my time with my family, but I thought that first it would only be right to tell someone about this, even if you’ll never believe me. I looked it up, and this place seemed to be my best bet. So yeah, that’s about it.  
,,,

“Statement ends,” Jon added for posterity before turning off the tape recorder. “Do you still have the map or the coordinates for this library, Mr. Burrows?”

Lysander nodded, and then rummaged around in the small bag he’d brought in with him before pulling it out. “I don’t know if I’m going to die because I saw the place, or if it’s just a coincidence that me and the kid both… but just be careful, if you do decide to believe me.” He stood up and walked over to the office door, and then paused to look back at Jon. “Do you want to know what I learned down there that hit me harder than any news of my death could? Turns out that the kid was my kid all along.” He sighed, and then walked out of the office. 

Jon looked down at the map with a small frown. If it turned out that this library was a real place, there was so much knowledge there that Jon could- but no, that would be foolish. Whoever it was that made it clearly wasn’t interested in visitors, and Jon wasn’t going to risk any lives just to learn about a few fun facts about people. Besides, there wasn’t enough in the budget to justify a trip to the middle of the ocean, where a quick google search showed that there was nothing there. 

A few minutes later, Jon was interrupted from his thoughts by a polite knock on the open door, and he looked up. “Ah, Martin, I was just about to call for you. Can you bring this to artifact storage?”

Martin took the map, but didn’t leave right away. “Jon, about the other night…” he trailed off like he was hoping Jon would know what he was trying to say, but Jon just raised one eyebrow and waited for Martin to get his thoughts out. Martin sighed. “We went out for drinks, and I had a nice time, and then Sasha and Tim went home and it was just us and we- well I thought that you had fun too, but it seems like you’ve been ignoring me since then, and I don’t know if I’ve done something wrong, or-?”

Jon quickly shook his head. “You haven’t done anything wrong, it’s just- Christ, Martin, I’m your boss, and I’ve got a lot of- stuff going on, and… what do you want from me?”

Martin’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to answer right away even though Jon would have expected him to try and run off as soon as any real confrontation occurred. “I want to take you out. Like on a- a date. A proper one, not just another pub night with the whole office.” Then his cheeks immediately turned a bright red. “I didn’t mean to uh- well that’s the truth,” he mumbled, and it seemed he’d lost all his steam.

“I’m a terrible date,” Jon warned him. “Just ask my ex. I’m not sure a single day passed without her telling me what an awful boyfriend I am. And I don’t-”

“I know,” Martin interrupted, and then looked entirely embarrassed. “I mean, I may have heard some, uh… Anyways, boyfriend?” his voice squeaked on the last word.

Jon reached up to push his glasses back up his nose, and his fingers brushed against the mess of stubble and scars that made up most of his face these days. He wasn’t even sure why anyone would be interested in him now (not that he really understood why they would have been interested in him ever, if he was being honest with himself). “You’re probably going to regret this,” he pointed out. 

Martin just shrugged. “Maybe. But how would I know if I haven’t even gotten the chance to- to-”

“Alright,” Jon cut him off, taking pity on the assistant. “One date. And I’m choosing where because I don’t trust your ability to do so efficiently.” He kept his voice as strict and overly posh as always, but Martin still grinned at him brightly before leaving to take the map to artifact storage.

Jon spun around in his chair so that the others in the bullpen wouldn’t be able to see him, since he knew that he had a pretty dumb grin on his own face. Apparently he didn’t need any magical library to tell him about Martin, at least, because he was going to get the chance to find it all out for himself.


End file.
